On the Road to Atlanta – Thunderstorm at New Hope

The Battle of New Hope was fought on May 25th, 1864. It was a Federal frontal assault against a lightly entrenched Confederate line, which ended in bloody failure. A ferocious thunderstorm closed the battle, however, which left a memorable impression on the participants.

Caught up in the tail end of the assault, Col. Arlo Pardee of the 147th Pennsylvania also expressed considerable frustration: “The fight was over very broken ground,” he wrote, which, along with the intense enemy fire, “rendered our march in support anything but pleasant. I lost about twenty killed and wounded without firing a shot. I say d­­–n such fighting. One shell knocked down twelve men, wounding six of them.”[1]

Colonel John T. Lockman’s (formerly Buschbeck’s) Second Brigade trailed Candy but did not come into action. Lockman placed his six regiments in line astride the road, “four regiments to the right and two on the left” and moved forward for “a mile and a half.” By then, it was “so dark that it was impossible to proceed further.” Lieutenant William Lambert of the 33rd New Jersey found all to be “lethal chaos.” “Near night,” wrote Pvt. Colby Bryant of the 154th New York, “we fall into line and march far to where the battle is raging. . . . [O]n we go through brush and over logs until soon we come to the battlefield where the missiles of death are flying all around us.” As dark fell, however, the threatening storm finally burst, bringing rain in torrents and strobing lightning. Lambert “found the scene to be simultaneously ‘grand and awful’ with the flashes of . . . the cannons and muskets complemented by the ‘vivid glare of the lightening.’ . . . The ‘roaring rumble of the thunder in the heavens’ matched the noise” of the “‘weapons. It was more like hell than God’s beautiful earth.’”[2]

That storm, plus the night, shut down combat. The frontline Federal regiments began to throw up makeshift breastworks, working with whatever came to hand. “Along the ridge we worked like beavers,” recalled Lt. Stephen Pierson of the 33rd New Jersey, “digging with hands and bayonets.” Later, shovels came forward. As “the pioneers cut down trees, logs were rolled up and put on top of the little ridge of earth.” All of this was accomplished in the midst of a “fierce thunderstorm.” Sergeant Rice Bull of the 123rd New York recalled that “the rain came down in torrents, the lightning was blinding; then the darkness so black it could almost be felt. . . . During the storm one of the boys, who was quite a wag, lying in a pool of water turned to Captain Anderson . . . and said, ‘Now Captain, if you will just give the order, we will swim over and tackle the Johnnies.”[3]

[1]Gertrude K. Johnston, Dear Pa—And So It Goes (Harrisburg, PA: 1971), 306.

[2]OR 38, pt. 2, 207; Mark H. Dunkleman, Brothers One and All. Esprit de Corps in a Civil War Regiment (Baton Rouge, LA: 2004), 136; John G. Zinn, The Mutinous Regiment, the Thirty-Third New Jersey In the Civil War (Jefferson, NC: 2005), 107.

[3]Stephen Pierson, “From Chattanooga to Atlanta in 1864—A Personal Reminiscence,” Preceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society, vol. XVI, no. 1 (January, 1931), 339; K. Jack Bauer, ed. Soldiering, The Civil War Diary of Rice C. Bull, 123rd New York Volunteer Infantry (New York: 1988), 117-118.